What do you learn when you chat with 15 superintendents at all stages of their careers and from districts of all shapes and sizes? In this episode of District Administration’s Talking Out of School podcast, Paper CEO Phil Cutler shares insights from Leadership Voices, a series of interviews covering artificial intelligence, personalized learning, staffing challenges and the other issues that are top of mind for superintendents.
“It’s remarkable to see the trends and the patterns that are uniform regardless of where you are geographically, regardless of the demographics of your community,” Cutler says. “There are a lot of parallels.”
Interventions is one of Paper’s specialties and artificial intelligence now plays a bigger role in personalization. Not long ago, Cutler points out, many districts were scrambling to ban AI. “Now the pendulum has swung to the other end and they’re saying how do we use [AI] to be as efficient as possible,” he says.
AI is beginning to transform instruction by allowing teachers to further personalize instruction based on each student’s interests and analyze assessment results more insightfully.
“It’s one thing to assign a quiz that’s been generated by AI but now if you can analyze the results and recommend interventions and what the next steps are for each student, you’re doing a lot of the hard work that’s time-consuming for a teacher,” he continues. “You’re letting teachers do what they’re best at, which is teaching. There’s going to be a lot more of that coming.”
Near the end of our interview, Cutler also touches on what surprised him in the Leadership Voices series, including just how much education has—or hasn’t—changed since the pandemic. “It’s four years later and school looks the same in a lot of cases as it did in 2019,” he noted. “A lot of the problems are the same problems we were dealing with. We haven’t transformed the way schools operate the way a lot of these superintendents thought we would.”
You can listen to this episode at any time on Apple, Spotify, Podbean or down below.
